A Prince of Song and Shade: A Tale of Stars and Shadow, Book 2 (eBook)

You can read your ebooks on any eReader (Amazon, Kobo, Nook), your tablet, phone, computer, and/or in the free BookFunnel app.

1. You will receive an immediate email from help@bookfunnel.com - this email contains the link to your book.
2. Click on the link in the BookFunnel email. It will look something like bookhip.com/(letters).
3. Follow the prompts to download your ebook to the device of your choice.

Chapter 1
The air was thick. Sticky. Warm. Under his cloak and mask his skin was slick with sweat. It ran in rivulets down his spine, soaking the feathers resting against his shoulder blades. He hated wearing the cloak, but without it the glamour wouldn’t entirely hide his wings, so it was an uncomfortable necessity.
Night had fallen, leaving the area dark and full of shadows unbroken by the faint moonlight above. The darkness seemed as heavy as the air, as if waiting for something.
“Is she coming?”
“She’ll be here, Garrow.” The Shadowhawk used a soothing tone as he spoke to the shivering man pressed against the wooden wall of the closed bakery. Dark bruising shadowed his jaw and left eye and blood crusted around a split lip. It was far too hot to be shivering, but Garrow was terrified. He was a tanner’s apprentice, barely twenty years old, and orphaned young on the streets of the Poor Quarter. He’d also been a member of the Shadowhawk’s network for over a year.
“What if they find us?”
They’d been out four nights earlier stealing crates of flour from a merchant ship out of the Montagni port of Acleu. Garrow had gotten lazy afterwards and had made too much noise sneaking back into his master’s home before dawn. Suspicious and venal, the tanner had reported him the very next day, and been paid handsomely for it by the City Patrol.
“They won’t.” The Shadowhawk swallowed. Breaking Garrow out of the City Patrol building in the Dock Quarter had been easy compared to dealing with the waves of Garrow’s terror crashing against him.
His powerful winged folk magic was a blessing and curse in equal measure. It allowed him to subtly manipulate the emotions of those around him and keep his true identity hidden beneath the mask of the Shadowhawk, but it also meant he felt those same emotions almost as if they were his own. The closer he was physically to a person, and the stronger their emotion, the more it would affect him.
He was well-practiced at managing his response to the myriad of emotions around him day-to-day—all winged folk with song magic were—but extremes of emotion he found harder to bear because of the depth of his power.
Another flare of fear from Garrow brought the Shadowhawk sharply back to the present. The apprentice was too young for this—too young to be so terrified, too young to be risking his life trying to help others. “You’re going to be fine.” He tried to reassure him. “I’ll make sure of it.”
The man’s shivering calmed and he managed a shaky nod. “Thank you. For getting me out.”
“I’m sorry you got caught helping me.”
Garrow must have read the deep guilt in his voice because he stopped trembling, voice sounding firmer than it had before. “I would do it again. This was my choice, Shadowhawk. I’d like to be less of a blubbering mess about it, but I’d do it again.”
Both their attention was caught by the sound of quick, confident footsteps approaching, and the Shadowhawk’s shoulders relaxed. “She’s here.”
Saniya’s form appeared out of the dimness a few moments later, dark blue eyes watchful, scanning them both for potential danger. One hand rested loosely on the hilt of the knife at her belt. “Warm night for it, Shadowhawk.”
“Saniya. This is Garrow.”
“You were on the crew last week.” Saniya nodded at the young man. Her people had helped them hide the stolen flour until the search for it died down. “Can you walk?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Taking a deep breath, Garrow stepped away from the wall. “I’m fine, just a few bruises and scrapes.”
“Then we’d best move before someone notices us all standing around out here.” Saniya glanced at the Shadowhawk. “The flour was distributed last night—to all the store owners you named, minus our cut.”
“Pleasure, as always,” he said. “Take care of Garrow. I’ll be in touch.”
“Later, Shadowhawk.”
He remained wrapped in the shadows under the overhang of the bakery until Saniya’s and Garrow’s footsteps faded from hearing. This area of the Market Quarter was usually deserted so late at night, all the store owners and market operators gone home to their beds.
Yet despite the darkness, the oppressive heat, and the stench of rotting produce coming from a nearby alley, he felt far more at home here than he ever did up at the citadel. Where he pretended to be a prince. Pretended to be just like all the other winged folk with their disdain for humans and firm belief in their superiority.
Even after Saniya was long gone, he stayed. As useful as she was to him, he didn’t trust her entirely, couldn’t afford to trust her. Trust was impossible in his world. He wanted to make sure he was utterly alone before moving on to his next task of the night.
The darkness cloaking him ensured he couldn’t be seen by anyone passing by. Another talent he’d been born with that nobody knew about. That and his glamour magic had allowed him to don the mask of the Shadowhawk despite being Prince Cuinn Acondor, the worthless younger prince of Queen Sarana.
Footsteps sounded to his left and he went utterly still. Something about the anticipatory sense in the night air bothered him. Made him more cautious than usual.
A man came into sight, moving with quick strides down the empty street, shoulders up, eyes alert. The Shadowhawk’s gaze went straight to the distinctive grey and white of the Wolf uniform he wore.
He was alone, and though no obvious threat loomed, the Shadowhawk moved, slipping after the Wolf, keeping to the darkest shadows on the edge of the street.
Instinct prickled down the back of his neck.
He rarely extended his song magic to read or affect those outside his immediate vicinity when he was the Shadowhawk—not willing to risk a winged person in the area sensing it, despite how skilled he’d become at hiding. If that happened… well, then they’d be one step closer to catching him. No human had song magic. And there were few winged folk powerful enough at it to manipulate others into believing they were human.
And if he were caught… well, winged man or human, the last Shadowhawk had been executed and his entire family along with him. Few knew it—it was a tightly held secret within the Acondor family and Queencouncil members. The executions of the Ciantar family had been public, the queen announcing they’d been caught embezzling izerdia profits and calling it treason. None beyond her and the Queencouncil members knew that their true crime was helping hide the activities and identity of the previous Shadowhawk.
To the humans of Dock City, the criminal that had been helping them had simply disappeared one day. None of them had bothered themselves much about an entire family being executed around the same time. After all, executions weren’t all that rare in a world ruled by the Acondor family.
Thinking about the frustration and fury his mother must feel, to have had the Shadowhawk reappear in Dock City after so many years had passed, sometimes made Cuinn smile. She thought she’d dealt with the problem, only to have the shadowy criminal reappear on the streets of Dock City two decades later.
But those smiles always faded quickly. A family had been wiped from existence because one man tried to make things better for his people. There was no satisfaction to be had in that.
Nor in the fact that he would undoubtedly meet the same end.
He had little doubt his mother wouldn’t hold back when it came to her youngest son. And even if she did, if he could hope for a mother’s love to save him, Mithanis would ensure his death no matter what their mother said.
So he resorted to the shadows, to the darkness that had wrapped around him and kept him hidden and safe since boyhood. Tonight, though, the shadows were uneasy, the feeling growing stronger the longer he followed the Wolf.
Abandoning caution, he extended his magic, increasing his mental focus so that his glamour wasn’t affected, and searched the vicinity for any emotion that might hint at danger. At first there was nothing. The area was deserted. Shops closed. People in bed.
But then he caught it. A flicker of emotion from the opposite end of the street—right where the Wolf was heading. Weariness surged as his magic narrowed in on that flicker, and a sharp ache started in his temples. Using all three of his abilities in such a focused way was an effort of will and had its consequences. He spent most of his life with tiredness dragging at his body.
Gritting his teeth, he ignored the energy drain and focused on whoever was waiting at the end of the street.
Anger. Violence. Both emotions mixed with a hint of anticipation. And there was more than one man. The Wolf had almost reached them, his emotional state alert but unalarmed. He hadn’t seen either human lying in wait.
The Shadowhawk swore, then let go his hold of the shadows and started running.
At almost exactly the same moment, a man broke from the darkness at the end of the street and lunged at the Wolf, moonlight glinting from a blade in his right hand. The two collided, and there was a brief tussle which ended with the Wolf being knocked to the ground. His assailant vanished into the dim alley on the opposite side of the street almost as quickly as he had appeared.
The whole thing had happened in a matter of seconds.
The Shadowhawk was there an instant later. The Wolf was down, cradling a bleeding arm. But before the Shadowhawk could say anything, he rolled, came to his feet and drew his sword in one smooth movement, ignoring what must have been serious pain from his wound.
The Shadowhawk summoned his magic again and caught the flare of emotion from the direction where the assailant had disappeared. The second man still hovered, hidden, outside the dim light of the moon. The thud of boots sounded a heartbeat later.
“To your left!” He shouted a warning to the Wolf.
Then he threw himself sideways, slamming into the nearest man before he could reach the Wolf, and sending them both crashing hard to the ground. Pain flared through his elbow as it cracked against stone. His opponent was surprisingly strong, and quick. Despite the hard landing, his adversary rolled instantly, stabbing upwards with a knife. The Shadowhawk lurched away, landing on his back, the air hissing from his lungs, wings folding painfully underneath him.
He rolled and pushed off with both hands, part of his focus on forcing his wings to remain furled at his back, hidden under his glamoured cloak, the rest on leaping at his opponent as he came to his feet.
The flash of copper had him hesitating mid-leap, bungling his move so that instead of taking the man out, they tangled, rolling to the ground. This time the Shadowhawk elbowed his opponent hard in the face—a face mostly hidden by a copper mask. The man swore and kicked out savagely.
Made angry enough to lash out again by the hot spurt of pain from a booted foot connecting with his ribs, the Shadowhawk slammed his elbow into the man’s jaw. His adversary’s pain hit him a moment later, but it was brief and quickly controlled—a trained fighter, no doubt. Without the emotion to distract him, the Shadowhawk struck again, hard, before his adversary could retaliate. Fortunately the man blacked out before any more emotion could hit him.
The Shadowhawk’s stomach roiled as he staggered to his feet, elbow throbbing. Consequences of song magic aside, he hated using violence of any kind, hated the idea that it was ever necessary. But in the world he lived in, there were times it was necessary. A truth he bitterly accepted but continued to rail against.
“Watch out!” the Wolf warned. He was calm, the words a brisk order rather than panicked shout.
The Shadowhawk spun to find the Wolf’s opponent lying prone on the cobblestones, and two more men emerging from the dark around them. Both of the new men wore copper masks. And now the one he’d hit was unsteadily dragging himself to his feet, blood pouring from a split lip.
Shit. There’d been more of them.
The Wolf stepped towards the Shadowhawk, sword ready to strike, moon glinting along its silver surface. The Shadowhawk drew the sharp knife he kept concealed in his cloak. Hopefully the sight of it was warning enough that he wouldn’t be forced to use it.
The assailants paused. His heart thudded in his chest, his fear and hope twisting with the anger and undercurrent of viciousness in the men he faced down into a nauseating churn. One man stepped forward, crouching down to shake his unconscious comrade. He roused weakly and was helped to his feet, still swaying. The two backed up slowly to where the other waited, poised to strike.
Then, as suddenly as they’d come, the men split up and disappeared into narrow alleyways leading away from the main street.
Once their running footsteps—one pair much slower and more unsteady than the others—had faded from hearing, the Shadowhawk sheathed the knife and tried to catch his breath. His muscles were beginning to tremble, always a bad sign he was using too much magic. “Are you all right?” he asked the Wolf.
“Yes, sir. He got me with his knife, but I twisted out of the way just in time. The cut is long but shallow.” A quick smile, white teeth flashing against brown skin. “Thanks to those sabai lessons Captain Parksin makes us do every day.”
The Shadowhawk rubbed his sore elbow.
The Wolf glanced at him. “That the same copper mask you’ve seen before? The same people that tried to assassinate Prince Cuinn?”
“Yeah,” he said heavily. Tiredness flooded him. He thought Talyn and her Wolves had killed all of them that night on Sparrow Island. But now… “They were targeting you just now.”
The Wolf frowned a little as his gaze ran over the cloak and the mask, presumably realising he was talking to the Shadowhawk. “It seems so.”
The Shadowhawk hesitated a moment—the young man’s polite tone, his sober expression… there was something familiar about him. He’d seen the Wolf before, he was sure of it. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Andres Tye.” He smiled a little. “I don’t need to ask your name, do I?”
“You used to be the watch officer for the Market Quarter Patrol.” Surprise flickered through the Shadowhawk’s voice. Tye had been one of the good ones, never taking bribes or acting outside his authority. “You’re a Wolf now?”
“That’s right. Captain Parksin recruited me to run one of his details after Captain Dynan left. I was just out visiting some of my old Patrol mates tonight. If you hadn’t come along, things might have gone very differently.” Andres glanced at one of the alleys the men had disappeared down. “Seems like someone might be unhappy about what happened on Sparrow Island.”
The Shadowhawk nodded. “You’d better head back to your barracks, tell Captain Parksin what happened. I’ll follow behind, make sure you get there okay.”
“Thanks for your help.” Andres sheathed his sword and offered his hand.
It was a courteous, sincerely-meant gesture, something so typical of these men and women that Talyn Dynan had trained. She’d turned them into something greater than the sum of their parts.
He took the hand, shaking firmly. “Next time don’t walk alone down dark streets at night, even in the Market Quarter. That goes for all the Wolves. Whoever this gang is, if they’re after some sort of revenge against you, they’ll try again. You should start going out in pairs.”
“I’ll tell the captain.” Tye nodded. “You should be careful yourself. They’ll know you helped me tonight.”
The Shadowhawk followed at a discreet distance until the Wolf had safely reached the wall path. He then stood in the shadows and watched until Tye made it safely to the top, thoughts toying uneasily over what had just happened.
Those men hadn’t been after anything but murder. Not going at Andres with a knife like that—no demands, no attempt to steal anything.
Almost a month earlier, the group calling themselves Vengeance had staged a botched assassination attempt on the queen, hitting Prince Cuinn and his well-trained guard detail instead of their real target. But before that they’d busied themselves murdering wealthy humans who ventured into the Poor Quarter after dark.
The incongruity of the gang and its actions nagged at him, made him uneasy. If he couldn’t understand them, he couldn’t come up with a way to combat them. And some deep instinct warned him that they needed to be stopped.
He’d hoped that their utter failure on Sparrow Island—the fact Talyn had almost single-handedly killed every fighter they sent—might have ended the group.
Tonight indicated that wasn’t the case. Not even close.
Now… a chill ran down his spine. Maybe they felt they had a score to settle with the Wolves.
Another score to settle. His fingers slid unbidden into his right pocket, to the note still crumpled there.
He pushed the thought away and yanked his hand out of his pocket, dismissing the feeling of dread. He was over-tired and running low on magic reserves. Once he’d rested, none of the night’s events would seem so dire.
The Shadowhawk glanced up. Andres reached the top of the wall and vanished from sight.
Retracing his steps, it didn’t take long for the Shadowhawk to reach the alley backing onto several popular Market Street stores. One of them was a kahvi café, its owner his contact for the Shadowhawk’s cell in the Market Quarter. Their meeting was planned and Petro was waiting for him in the dim light of a single lamp lit in his back storeroom.
The Shadowhawk checked his mask and glamour were still in place—ingrained habit, but even more necessary given the weariness tugging at him after the fight—before he stepped into the light.
“Shadowhawk.” Petro greeted him with a quick smile.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, keeping his voice businesslike. His contacts risked their lives every time they helped him, and though he was often tempted by the thought of giving them more of himself, making them friends rather than just helpers, it would only put them in more danger. And he couldn’t live with himself if assuaging his loneliness got one of them killed. Even if that meant he was always alone. “How are things?”
“Quiet, mostly. But even though we don’t feel it down here, winter has hit good and proper up in Mair-land. The poorer folk will struggle, particularly those in more isolated villages.” Petro made a face. “Especially when the penalty for illegally chopping wood is worth up to a year’s wages for some of them.”
The familiar feeling of uselessness welled up in him. The winged folk lived in a citadel that was warm all year round, and the queen and her court only spent any time in the cold of the SkyReach when they escaped the summer heat to go to their palace in the mountains. That meant the Queencouncil rarely, if ever, traded for cold weather supplies, including clothing. That left the small human-owned businesses in the north reliant on sourcing and importing what they needed from Montagn or the Twin Thrones themselves, which was difficult and prohibitively expensive to do on a small scale.
The Shadowhawk had contacts up there, of course, but without supplies imported by the winged folk to steal, there was very little they could do to provide meaningful help for those in Mair-land. And since Cuinn Acondor lived in the citadel, the Shadowhawk could only be in the north when Cuinn was, which was rare.
“I wasn’t blaming you,” Petro said after the silence dragged on. “I know there’s little we can do for them.”
The Shadowhawk nodded and pushed his despair away. He shifted, leaning more comfortably against a stack of boxes, allowing himself to relax. It was a little cooler in Petro’s storeroom, cosy in the lamplight, and there was no danger in the emotions he was reading off the young man. “I’ve been thinking. What we do doesn’t necessarily always have to be about stealing or breaking the law.”
Petro looked interested. “I’m listening.”
“Maybe it’s time for us to start helping ourselves a bit more down here. I’m thinking of the izerdia workers. I know some of them are genuine criminals, but more are there to fill quotas paid for by winged folk bribes. They come out of that tunnel every night exhausted and starving, if they’ve managed to survive the day.”
Petro’s eyes lit up. “What are you suggesting?”
His voice turned eager. “What if we spoke to the store and food stall owners in the Market and Wealthy Quarters, asked them to package up their leftovers each day? Just the stuff that spoils and would go in the trash anyway. Your network could collect it each night, leave it by the tunnel entrance.” He paused. “I figure if they get some proper food into them, things will be a bit easier.”
“Regular meals will make them stronger, better able to protect themselves.” Petro stood straighter. “I’d do it, Shadowhawk, and I know at least a handful of others who would too. If we got enough of a response, we could even think about extending into the homeless slums in the Poor Quarter too—for those too sick or old to get work on the izerdia detail or anywhere else.”
“Can you organise it discreetly? Your helpers would have to collect the food each night and take it to the tunnel entrance.”
Petro shook his head. “No, let’s ask the store owners to take it themselves. That way it’s all above-board and there’s nothing for the Falcons or Patrol to get suspicious about. Plus then my people aren’t exposing themselves unnecessarily.”
“Good idea. And maybe those who don’t have leftover food to offer could help with deliveries then? Make that their way of contributing.”
“We’ll get the word out tomorrow.” Petro grinned. “Let’s keep you out of this as much as possible.”
He straightened. “Thank you, Petro.”
“Thank you. This will really help those poor bastards trekking out into the forest every day.”
“I’d better go. Leave a message if you have any troubles with the Patrolmen escorts for the workers—hopefully they won’t stick their noses in, but you never know.”
“Before you go.” Petro reached back for a small canvas bag and tossed it to him. “I thought you might be running low on these after the other night.”
The Shadowhawk caught it neatly, the weight and feel telling him it carried more of his arrows—the ones Petro carved for him. “Thanks. I’ll see you, Petro.”
The door closed quietly behind him, the lamplight snuffing out. The weariness crashed over him again, making him want to simply curl up in a ball and sleep on the side of the street. It wasn’t just physical, even though the constant drain on his magic was a big part of it.
He had no one.
Not a single person in the world that knew who he really was, what he did with every free moment he could extract from his life as Prince Cuinn. When up at the citadel, he had to pretend to be the partying prince, using that life to hide who he really was, using it as a distraction from the burning need inside him to do more, from the equally strong guilt and shame that he wasn’t doing more. And then at night he had to pretend to be the human street criminal who couldn’t risk others knowing him because it put their lives in danger. It was achingly powerful, that loneliness.
Dwelling on it helped nothing, however. With a deep breath, he drew himself out of his thoughts and turned his attention to the street around him. He waited until the darkness enclosed him fully, then set off again.
He would leave a mark in the usual place for Navis—he might be able to find something out about the group of copper-masked criminals who called themselves Vengeance—store Petro’s new arrows at his apartment, and then hopefully he could get back up to the citadel in time to sneak past his Wolf detail and get to bed before daylight dawned.
He cursed Talyn Dynan as much as he welcomed what’d she’d built these days. Her warriors were good—two full details now had finished their training—and his mother hadn’t left him any choice but to agree to having a guard detail on his quarters all night.
It was getting harder and harder to sneak out. What he would do if one of them found him out, he had no idea.
What they would do was an even bigger question.